Starting up the project

I met Deki about a year ago and found we had something in common, we both wanted to work on a project in Africa in connection with building a school. Deki had had his idea for ages but my own idea had only come about after spending a short time in Africa and getting to know the people there.

Deki is from Ghana but he lives in London and my own connection with Africa comes from being married to a Nigerian man.

My first experience of Africa was in Senegal where I married my husband in 2005. I loved the area, the people and the culture. I was able to walk out at night with no fear of walking in the dark alone despite being a white person. People would say hello on passing and I felt safe. I loved the aroma of the market places, the hussle and bussle and the laid back attitude towards life.

At that time my husband and I lived in a shared bungalow. There was one kitchen shared by 4 families. My husband and I had a single callor gas bottle on which we used to place a metal ring on which we used to cook some incredible meals. Our washing would be hung up on the roof and would dry in no time at all and I would look down from the rooftop to the people walking by and watch the goats and children at play.

Later we moved to Nigeria, but unfortunately it was not possible for me to stay there continuously because of my own personal health problems. Nigeria was vastly different to Senegal. In Senegal I stepped outside of the front door onto sand and we lived not too far from the sea but in Nigeria the ground is hard but oh so green and lush.

The roads in Senegal were tarmacked over and more orderly to drive upon and somehow seemed fairly clean, but my first experience of Nigeria was at the airport where beggars galore pounced upon the unwary, being shooed away by the dozen.

I experienced travelling from Lagos to Benin City a journey that I would not wish to repeat too frequently as the journey is arduous to say the least and packed into a full mini bus along with luggage and sometimes lacking in AC is not exactly a journey of comfort...lol

I grew to love the people of Nigeria and having visited outlying villages with my husband I found the idea formulating in my mind of how nice it would be to build some village schools as many of the people there are totally without any formal education.

So when I met Deki and we spoke of our ideas it seemed very natural to come together and actually do something about them.

Deki had been thinking of his idea for some period of time and had a little money available to invest into the project, whereas all I have is ideas. I'm an ideas person. We decided to pool our ideas and actually do something to bring the project into being.

Deki is planning to go to Ghana on the 4th of April to look at and hopefully buy some land there on which to build our project. We talked today of what to call it and decided a fitting name would be The MasterPath Project not to be confused with www.masterpath.org which is a spiritual path. The thoughts behind the choice of name for the project is simply that we would like all those involved in our project to Master some life skills that will help them walk the Path of life in a more fulfilled manor. Teaching them that all is possible when people work together as a team whilst enhancing their own life's experiences at the same time.